Paradigm (9781909490406) Read Online Free Page A

to the two bedrooms and a green porcelain bathroom that always smelled of cheap bleach.
    Alice and her mother slept in the room with the door that hung lazily off the hinges. Not like the door to the spare bedroom—the only room with a bed—that was always closed tight.
    â€˜You don’t ever go in there,’ her mother had said soon after they had moved in. ‘Not ever.’
    â€˜Why can’t it be my bedroom?’
    â€˜Because it’s a bad room. And even when I’m in there, you can’t even be outside the door. Do you hear me?’
    Alice heard her—and she never went in there and neither of them used the bed to sleep in. Each night, they stayed on the mattress together. When her mother finally got in from work, that was.
    Whenever anyone came up to the bedrooms, the staircase creaked with the weight of the world thrown up in the form of a crinkled map of the globe that covered the whole wall. The map had once hung inside a crystal glass frame in her father’s study in the days before, but now it had to make do with a rusty nail in each corner, pegging it in place. Alice had put it there herself when she and her mother had first moved in, balancing precariously on a chair with a claw hammer in one hand and a scratch of rusty pin tacks in the other. The glass frame that had protected it was long gone. It had been destroyed, like many other things, in the move to the city. On the evenings when her mother left her alone, Alice would sit on the stairs and look at the map, thinking about the different countries she wanted to visit when she was older. She imagined the crimson and yellow sunsets of Africa and the peanut- and saffron-infused scents of the Far East and beaches where they would dance in the ice-blue waves of Thai oceans, teaching multicoloured birds to talk.
    When the realisation sunk in that this would never come true, Alice instead spent some evenings climbing another set of stairs, these ones made of ugly metal that led sharply upwards to the roof of Prospect House. In the twilight, before the teenagers ganged there, she would look out across the flatness of the city that spread out for miles beneath her like a mechanical meadow filled with insects. If there was no work, her mother would sometimes join her there.
    â€˜This place is only a stop gap,’ she said as they gazed across the spires and towers in the first week that they moved in. She lit a cigarette and the smoke lingered across the horizon. ‘Don’t worry—we’ll be out of here soon. We just have to save some money and we’ll be gone. We’ll be where are supposed to be.’
    â€˜Where are we supposed to be?’ said Alice.
    â€˜I don’t know yet,’ said her mother.
    But why do we have to stay here?’ said Alice. ‘Why couldn’t we just stay in our old house?’ Alice’s mother bit her lip so hard that a tiny drop of blood leaked out of the corner.‘Because sometimes things have to get worse before they get better,’ she said and sucked at the trail of blood on her lip. And there was nothing much else to say after that.
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    A s much as Alice hated their new home, there were days that were brighter than others. Sometimes she would stand on her balcony at the back of the flat, watching the pigeons dive at the fragments of stale bread that she dropped from a bag in the evening sunlight. She wondered who would feed them if she weren’t there and decided that probably nobody would. It was her duty.
    Other times, Alice would peak on tiptoe across at Mr Hutchinson, the next-door neighbour, who would always stand on his back balcony smoking a pipe. She watched as he drew in hard on his pipe and sucked big lungfuls of smoke inwards, only to heave them out in dirty great ‘O’s across the city. Once he caught her looking, but he just smiled and kept hacking out the big puffy circles that floated out over the balcony. Alice watched until